I grew up in rural Massachusetts, and have spent the entirety of my adult life in Seattle, Washington. I currently live downtown with my wife and, unfortunately, no cats.

I am a lifetime software engineer, having learned to type about the same time I learned to write. I have been programming computers since I was seven years old, and still do at least one major software engineering project every year. I am now officially a “grumpy old man”, and you will often hear me complain about how the current generation of programmers has hardware that runs hundreds of times faster than what I grew up with, yet still writes software that runs at half the speed, or worse.

The most significant project I’ve created to date has been The Granny Animation SDK, a complete animation pipeline system that I first shipped in 1999 and which, 15 years later, still is in active use at many top-tier game studios. More recently, I worked with Jeff Roberts and Fabian Giesen to develop Bink 2, RAD Game Tools’s next generation video compression technology, and I rewrote the movement system and helped extend the world editor for Jonathan Blow’s upcoming game The Witness.

In November of 2014, I started the Handmade Hero project, a nightly live broadcast that aims to teach low-level game programming fundamentals to the next generation of game programmers. Honestly, I’ve been shocked at how well it’s been received, and how far its spread throughout the programming world in such a short time.

My current research interest is interactive fiction. Stay tuned for a full project announcement coming in mid-2015.